It’s weird to talk about “the best show on TV” now that The Sopranos and The Wire are off the air, and the end of Battlestar Galactica brings that particular third-way contrarian option to a close.

There’s the old Yeats joke; when Swinburne died, WBY said, “Now I’m king of the cats” — and he was (probably) for the next thirty years. It’s strange now that the new king of cats might actually be on broadcast TV rather than cable — but Mad Men aside, that’s where we seem to be — and there are a LOT of genuinely ambitious network shows out there.

Rex makes the case for Dollhouse, which has indeed picked up. If you were (figuratively) buying stock in a show, it’d be a hot bet. But I’m going to stick with Lost in the drama category (no one does it like you), 30 Rock for character-based comedy (Liz Lemon is our decade’s female answer to Homer Simpson), and The Daily Show/The Colbert Report hour for sheer cultural relevance — simply put, nothing else is essential.

Sorry if those answers seem boring, but that’s just how it is sometimes.

Look, I like Flight of the Conchords. I bought the first season DVD. “All the Ladies in the World” was my son’s favorite song when he was six months old. I probably sing at least one of their songs a week.

If we’re talking shows that are still sorta’ on TV, then I’d have to make a pitch for Mad Men. In a weird way, I find it more relevant than the Daily Show (I think that whole Stewart/Cramer thing was misguided catharsis – Cramer was just a straw man).

Stewart/Cramer is only misguided catharsis if you think the target was someone or something else than it was intended to be. If Cramer’s supposed to be a stand-in for the whole financial system, then yes, it’s misguided.

But I think Stewart was actually pretty clear that his anger was particularly about financial news networks. Again, this point cannot be made too often — The Daily Show is not about politics. It’s about media.

Totally with you re: Mad Men — but I still think it’s weird that for so long, HBO and premium cable just devastated broadcast TV when it came to quality of programming, but that’s just not the case anymore.